The Principal Enemy

Back in the seventies when I was a lefty and under the sway, like the new mayor of the city of New York, of various Central and South American marxists, we used to speak of "el enemigo principal," the principal enemy. In fact, there was a rather graphic (and well made) Bolivian movie of that name by leftwing director Jorge Sanjines. (Clip here.)

Not surprisingly in those days the principal enemies of Sanjines' film were los yanquis and their dreaded CIA -- a bit of a cliché, one must admit, but the idea of having a principal enemy in itself is not bad, if you know who it really is. Identifying your enemy can make you more effective, whoever you are.

And, whether they know it or not, Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, center-right folks, all those who favor smaller government and increased freedom, do have a principal enemy. But, surprisingly, it's no longer Barack Obama. He is over. He was already a lame duck when Obamacare plucked most of his remaining feathers. The damage he can do may still be serious, but most of it will be reparable.

The principal enemy for the right and the center-right is now Hillary Clinton, the vastly favored frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. She is so far in front, in fact, that her competitors are not even in hailing distance. Hillary is the one who can consolidate and solidify the "gains" of the Obama era in a way Obama himself never could because she is much more politically savvy -- Obama was only savvy about getting elected, not governing -- and has the backing of her even more politically savvy husband. Hillary is the one who can fully remake the United States into some version of Western Europe or, yet more frighteningly, China, a permanently stratified state capitalism governed by quasi-totalitarian bureaucrats. (We can call this system Soros Marxism, meaning a ruling clique of increasingly rich corporate czars employing a propagandistic veneer of socialist equality to keep the power and wealth for themselves.)

As Roger Kimball pointed out, the New York Times (the very model of that propagandistic veneer) already knows their bread is buttered with Hillary, not Obama. They demonstrated that Saturday with their revisionist article on Benghazi, bent on taking that scandal (Hillary's Achilles' heel) off the table for the coming elections or at least seriously defusing it. Republicans would do well to redouble their efforts to make sure this particular obfuscation does not succeed by doing the proper research and communicating the results to the public -- succinctly and repeatedly.

But to do this our group must concentrate on the principal enemy and not upon each other. My inbox is filled with emails on both sides of the inter-right wars (the Tea Partiers and the so-called RINOs) excoriating each other. What unmitigated idiocy -- as if Lindsey Graham or Ted Cruz was the principal enemy and not Hillary Clinton. It's a war between those who favor cutting government by seventy percent versus those who favor cutting it by fifty or sixty, ignoring those who want to expand it by a hundred. Although not nearly as violent, it's in some weird way reminiscent of the party rectification campaigns practiced by Stalinists back in the 1940s.

Sensible? Obviously not. And monumentally self-defeating. It has the word "loser" written all over it -- and at a time when the opposition is reeling. 2014 is a time for victory not defeat. We shouldn't be wasting our ammunition on each other. Nobody has unlimited quantities. Concentrate on principal enemy Hillary. Even though she is a well-documented liar, she is still "most admired." Tell the truth (well) and end this. And end the hostility toward each other before you destroy all of us and our children's future.